Clear launches Clear Capture to remove inefficiencies in accounts payable process

Bengaluru (Karnataka) [India], October 19 (ANI/BusinessWire India): Clear, India’s leading fintech SaaS firm, today announced the launch of Clear Capture, an AI-based end-to-end solution for enterprises to streamline their accounts payable journey. The tool allows the Accounts Payable team of enterprises to automate purchase invoice entry and detect non-compliant and fraudulent invoices coming from their suppliers.

Clear Capture empower an enterprise’s AP team by automatically validating all their incoming invoices and extracting the invoice data to bring over 90 per cent automation into their invoice booking process. Its AI-based data extraction technology cuts the invoice entry time from ten minutes per invoice entry to a few seconds. With Clear Capture, the company expects to digitize and validate 75 million purchase invoices with an average invoice value of Rs 50,000 in three years.
The tool runs 45+ compliance checks on invoices to identify mismatches by analyzing and comparing the invoice fields. It also minimizes errors and cuts short the man-hours needed for invoice data entry which reduces overheads. Post validation of invoices, the users also get an option to export the invoices hassle-free directly to their ERPs or accounting systems.
Archit Gupta, Founder and CEO of Clear, said, “An important first step in the compliance journey of an enterprise is recording the invoice for goods received. Clear Capture is a powerful tool for invoice digitisation by AP teams that reduces errors and the time spent on invoice recording. Our AI based technology can help enterprises save lakhs of man hours spent on invoice capture each year.”

Prior to launch, Clear ran a survey with 2,000 enterprises across India aimed at identifying the pain points of managing accounts payable.
– The survey revealed that accounts payable teams in enterprises spend more than 70% of their time reconciling supplier invoices with purchase order and goods receipt data. The trends highlighted are not restricted to large enterprises alone. Mid-sized enterprises dealing with multiple vendors and handling high volumes of invoices also faced similar issues.
– 80 per cent of respondents rely on people and paper-based processes, and it takes almost 8 minutes for data entry personnel to punch a purchase invoice.
– Respondents noted that due to heavy dependency on fully manual approval processes such as inter-office mail/courier dispatches, enterprises end up taking more than 10 days to punch a single invoice.
– Very few organizations, less than 15 per cent of the sample, reported a fully-automated AP function where the booking of purchase invoices in ERP on average takes less than two days. These long cycles have hampered the supplier relationships due to a lack of visibility of invoices and delays in payments.
In addition, there are inefficiencies associated with indexing when the quantum of invoices is high which leads to a lack of control and visibility of transactions. The accounting error rate is around 3-4 per cent, the respondents noted.
The accounts payable automation market in India is growing at 11% CAGR owing to the growth in spending of enterprises on digitisation of accounts payable processes to enhance business growth, as per MarketsandMarkets survey report on Accounts Payable automation.
Some of the tool’s other features include a single unified channel for communicating with vendors on their invoice compliance status, personalized dashboard, and configurable invoice approval workflows.
There have been multiple instances where enterprises have had to pay penalties worth lakhs of rupees for claiming ITC on fraudulent and non-compliant invoices. Therefore incorrect invoice recording can have a massive impact on an enterprise’s bottom line.
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